2007 North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad

Testimonials from past olympiad participants

Dragomir Radev

"As a teenager in Sofia, I spent a lot of my free time in the local "Filmotheque". I always wanted to become a movie director like Truffaut, Wenders, or Angelopoulos. That was until the day I learned about the Linguistics Olympiad. My high school was about to participate in it for the first time so there was still space on the team for those students who did well at the internal tryouts. Knowing a few foreign languages already, I had always been intrigued by their regularities and differences.

The contest seemed to fall at the right time. I ended up on the school team and won a couple of awards at the Bulgarian national contests. These were organized at the time by Prof. Ruslan Mitkov of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. I enjoyed the problems thoroughly - we had to decipher texts in obscure languages, figure out the Japanese calendar system, and "discover" vowel harmony in Hungarian and Turkish.

Twenty years later, here I am, doing research and teaching Computational Linguistics courses (http://tangra.si.umich.edu/clair) at the University of Michigan."

                                                                        Dragomir Radev




Susan Bilynskyj

"I was fascinated by the meanings of dinosaur names when I was little, and that, combined with my discovery of Tolkien's invented languages, fueled my interest in linguistics. When I was in elementary school, a family friend, Dr. Thomas Payne, wondered if I would like to act as "guinea pig" for problems to be used in the Linguistics Olympiad at the University of Oregon. I enjoyed solving the puzzles, some pertaining to languages I had never heard of, but all could be solved logically. A particularly tricky one involved telling time in Czech. In middle school I participated in the Olympiad and was very excited to see a problem on Luvian hieroglyphics; the dictionary I won as a prize has become one of my chief treasures.

Now, as a linguistics and classics major at Seattle Pacific University, I am studying in England at Oxford University. In my lectures on Indo-European phonology, I find the same delight in discovering the rules and patterns of language as I did in decoding the texts for the Linguistics Olympiad."

                                                                        Susan Bilynskyj




Debbie Cullen

"My students and I attended the Linguist Olympiad offered during the Foreign Language International Studies Day at the University of Oregon. What an intriguing contest! We were seated at tables around a large, old hall and given small booklets with varied linguistic tests to complete. The events were timed. My students had little to no experience with linguistics and language patterns. Yet they were eager to attempt the tasks and were not overwhelmed by them. Some were quite simple, others very complex. My students played the game and although they were far from the best, they had battled in a new field of endeavor and felt proud of their achievement. They walked out of there with a new appreciation for language intricacies and familiarities. We discussed the experience in class afterwards and looked at some of the elements of language creation and change. Since my students study high school Spanish, we couldn't spend too much time on linguistics, but it was enough to fascinate students who had a love for language. I wish more such events could be offered to my students.

                                                                        Debbie Cullen




Vladimir Plungian

I knew almost nothing about the Linguistic Olympiads, when one summer, when I was a junior in high school, I happened to come across one of the problem booklets. I had never seen anything like this, and within a few days, I had solved all of them. I remember that in one of the problems I independently discovered dual number in nouns. Nouns in most languages appear in singular and plural forms only. But in this language, nouns had three forms: singular (for one thing), dual (for two things) and plural (for more than two things).

This modest success extraordinarily inspired me. While in my senior year, I attended the Moscow Olympiad and managed to win third place. I did not solve every problem, but almost everything I solved, I solved correctly. As a prize for this (and for the best solutions to some problems), I won several books which I treasure to this day. One of them was a Grammar of the Khinalug Language, which I read as poetry, without understanding, but delighting in the enthusiasm of the original discoverers, which literally oozed from each page.

Yet, what pleased me most about the Olympiad was not the problems, but the people. Perhaps, for the first time in my life I met people, who were enthusiastic about what they were doing. This was in contrast to the dominant spirit of the times in the Soviet Union, the importance of which cannot be overestimated. All this taken together determined my career path: the fact that a high school student can discover "dual number" in an unfamiliar language, that the same high school student can obtain the kind of enjoyment from reading a grammar book as from reading poetry, and that that such activities and feelings implicitly, but very distinctly seemed like resistance. In essence this is exactly what they were. I do not know how this sounds to the present generation, or for those who are not familiar with our country. But among my contemporaries, whom I met in the first competition, the majority thought and felt exactly the same.

Eventually, I myself began to compose problems, and then for several years served as chair of the program and evaluation committees, along with other jobs. Throughout that time, and to this day, within me lives that fifteen year boy, who for the first time opened the booklet with the Olympiad problems, frozen by delight and amazement, not suspecting that at that moment my destiny had already been decided.

Vladimir Alexandrovich Plungian, PhD, professor and director of the Institute of Typological Linguistics, Russian Academy of Sciences; director the section of Corpus Linguistics and Poetics of the Institute of the Russian language named for V. V. Vinogradov, Russian Academy of Sciences; faculty member of the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics Moscow State University; professor of linguistics Russian State Humanities University.

                                                                         Vladimir Plungian